It was great when it all began
I was a regular Tony fan
But it was over when he had the plan
To invade Iraq and Aghanistan...
Ian Dunt has today written an article on stategy, cynicism and idealism which resonates with a twitter discussion I had yesterday with a fellow Labour Party member on using themes such as Tax Justice to make the Party more electable. To quote Ian's salient point:
Labour seems to have split into three factions: The beige, the red and the white. The beige – represented by Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper - are mechanical, seemingly without political values, poor to middling media performers and change according to the prevailing political weather. Burnham, for instance, was a Blairite under Blair, a Brownite under Brown and a Milibandite under Miliband. Under none of those personalities did he appear to be a winner. The whites, representing the white flag contingent and currently led by Kendall, have only one tactic: surrender. They are Blairites without any of the intellectual underpinnings. The reds, under Corbyn, are singing from the same socialist hymn sheet as ever, with absolutely no changes, either ideologically or tactically, since the 1970s.Ian Dunt ends his article by stating that Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Kendall have a lot to learn from each other if they sat down and listened to each other. I agree with this sentiment.
Is it so much to ask that we could ignore the beige, but have a little bit of red and white together? It is possible to get a genuine leftist into Downing Street, but it requires giving up on some of the political purity which seems to motivate Corbyn's supporters.
What I found interesting about the theme of Tax Justice was that Jeremy and Liz were approaching the subject from opposite ends but both were developing the theme: e.g. Liz's request of Margaret Hodge to look at the world of corporate welfare and Jeremy adopting the arguments of Richard Murphy that HMRC should calculate tax revenues using GDP (tax gap in excess of £100bn) rather than their own tax returns (tax gap of £35bn).
The ideas of how we collect taxes and where we spend them are two sides of the same coin.
So my proposal to my comrade was a mixture of cynicism and idealism. I proposed that part of the increased revenues from an aggressive HMRC operating on Tax Justice principles be used to reduce income tax on middle earners up to £100k to 35p in the pound.
We know that the wealthy through various accountancy-inspired schemes pay around 35% of income. The middle classes therefore pay a higher proportion of income. So reducing the percentage paid in tax by this cohort has some notional fairness to it.
I also think we shouldn't forget the lesson of the 1992 election when John Smith's tax proposals scared those who were struggling particularly in the over-heated South-East despite having what seemed reasonable salaries. The same conditions exist today so the Party needs to avoid scaring people with headlines about high taxation.. So by having a policy that supports the 'middle-classes' as defined by the Daily Mail would park the tanks on traditional Tory ground.
Given the increasingly blunt tool that is Income Tax for collecting from high earners, being creative in alternative tax devices to capture from the wealthy would be sensible and show some learning from George Osborne. This would mean giving up the symbolic 50p threshold that defines the Party as being anti-hard-working-families types (pass the sick bucket vicar). Less symbolism, more practical policies please.
Tax Justice with ensuring that the majority benefit from it would cause the Tories some difficulties and present problems to right-wing newspapers as well. It is a policy that is both cynical and idealistic.
So my message to the four leadership candidates is to rose-tint our world with smart polices. Don't dream it, be it...
